‘We’ve got to care for our kids’
FOLLOWING ARTHUR CASE, COUNCILLOR CLAIMS ADOPTED SON FAILED BY SOCIAL SERVICES
A COMMUNITY leader whose adopted son was stabbed to death says he was failed by social services.
Ann Edgeller’s plea for action to protect vulnerable youngsters came as Staffordshire County Council discussed the challenges social services face following the death of six-yearold Arthur Labinjo-hughes at the hands of his father and stepmother in Solihull.
And Councillor Edgeller shared her family’s experiences of social services in the early 1990s.
The Stafford representative fostered and later adopted Alex Cusworth, who had previously endured a horrific upbringing, when he was 12, but he continued to face challenges. He was serving an eight-year sentence at Dartmoor Prison for attacking his landlord when he was murdered, at the age of 37, by an inmate who stabbed him in the kitchens in 2015. Councillor Edgeller said: “I wasn’t going to speak on this but I feel I have to, as a foster parent and an adoptive parent of a child who was in care, (who), I have got to say, in all honesty, was failed by this county council. I want every councillor in this chamber to understand. He needed help; he didn’t get it straight away. In the end he lost his life because he never got the help and understanding as a child that he should have had. That anger and frustration for all the terrible things that happened to him was never dealt with. And so that anger and frustration came out later in life. “Somebody called him a paedophile. He wasn’t a paedophile, but he hit this man and was put in prison and he was murdered in prison in an abrupt attack.
“I want you all to understand please that we’ve got to do everything possible to look after our children.” Former council leader Philip Atkins said improvements had been made to children’s services in recent years. He told the meeting: “When you’re the leader of the council the buck stops with you. Every two weeks I would have a briefing on all the cases going on and an update on those that are ongoing. Some of the stories are horrific.
“Mike Lawrence, when he was the cabinet member for children’s services, inherited a poor, requiresimprovement service. The backlog on cases was horrendous. But with arduous work by children’s social workers, senior officers and Mike Lawrence it moved round from being poor and requires improvement to being good and almost outstanding. A lot of hard work has to go into that, a lot of support for children’s social workers. They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.”
Councillor Ian Parry said: ““We must ask ourselves why there are so many vacancies for social care workers in children’s services. Why is it we can’t recruit enough people to do those jobs, and why is it therefore that we give too much to those people to keep children safe? They say it takes a village to raise a child - this is not a problem that can be fixed by Government or councils alone. This is a societal problem. .”